In an open letter to the South African president, one of the country’s big labour unions and an organisation representing African migrant communities called for the identification of areas where xenophobic attacks might occur. Migration expert Alexandra Hiropoulos introduces Xenowatch, a project aiming to provide the building blocks to do that.

South African television programme Carte Blanche investigated the fraught journey to South Africa many Malawians experience. But their hard-hitting figure that “almost one-third of Malawi’s population” live in South Africa is completely off-point.

With a large migrant community in South Africa, both documented and undocumented, do a “vast number” of the “refugee and migrant children end up at the door of our social services department” and have to be placed “in children’s homes and foster care”, as was claimed recently?

A recent report published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees claims that there are more than a million asylum seekers in South Africa, and that the country is home to the highest number of unresolved asylum cases in the world. But the figure is based on a flawed reading of the available data.

There are a number of official-sounding figures about the number of foreign-born migrants in South Africa but many of them are exaggerated or based on unsound data. This factsheet presents the best available data sources.

Many reports on migration focus on international migration but the vast majority of migration that happens in South Africa happens within its borders. This factsheet explores the available data on the country’s domestic migration.

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For democracy to function, public figures need to be held to account for what they say. The claims they make need to be checked, openly and impartially. Africa Check is an independent, non-partisan organisation which assesses claims made in the public arena using journalistic skills and evidence drawn from the latest online tools, readers, public sources and experts, sorting fact from fiction and publishing the results.